Astronomers, including Harvard's Courtney Dressing, announced on Tuesday that they had found eight new planets orbiting their stars at distances compatible with liquid water, bringing the total number of potentially habitable planets in the just-right “Goldilocks” zone to a dozen or two, depending on how the habitable zone of a star is defined.

Astronomy Courses

Spotlight: Elisabeth Newton

Elisabeth Newton is pursuing her PhD with Prof. Dave Charbonneau as a member of the MEarth Project. MEarth is robotic survey looking for transiting planets around red dwarf stars in the solar neighborhood, with sites in the northern and southern hemispheres. Elisabeth, along with fellow graduate student Jason Dittmann, leverages MEarth's extensive data set to study the properties of these small, nearby stars. Elisabeth is currently investigating the stars' rotation periods, which are essential to understanding their magnetic fields and angular momentum evolution. In her previous work, she obtained near-infrared spectra of nearly 500 of the MEarth targets and developed techniques to measure the stars' absolute radial velocities and to estimate their metallicities, temperatures, and radii.

Elisabeth helped found the daily astronomy blog Astrobites and the ComSciCon workshop series on science communication. She recently talked at the CfA's public Observatory Night and tweets about science at @EllieInSpace. Elisabeth also enjoys art and baking, and can often be found rock climbing or biking around Cambridge.